In Douglas County, 16-year-old Shawn Cerniglia and his girlfriend, Carrie Heiden, were bound and gagged, stuffed into a car, taken to a field and shot execution-style in 2003. Shawn had watched Caleb Burns and Nathaniel York avenge a drug and money theft – Burns blew out the windows of a house with a shotgun – and they thought he was talking to police.

Police found Shawn’s burned car. But the bodies of the murdered teenagers were missing for three months before an Aurora farmer came across them in his field.

Shawn’s parents say that Burns and York, in a meeting at a local Red Robin restaurant, had warned Shawn and other witnesses not to talk, and that police investigators knew that.

The parents said they were not told of that threat before Shawn and Carrie were murdered, nor that Colorado has a program to protect threatened witnesses.

“If we had known – even caught a whiff – that this was more serious, we would have put him in Las Vegas with his mother. We would have done anything to make sure he was protected,” said Dana Cerniglia, Shawn’s stepmother.

“It would have been nice if they could have shared with us from the beginning: Your son was in danger. We weren’t even aware there was a witness-protection program in place. We didn’t have a clue.”

She and Duane Cerniglia, Shawn’s father, said that for a month after Shawn and Carrie were murdered, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office treated their disappearance as a runaway case.

The Sheriff’s Office called at one point and asked Duane to pick up Shawn’s burned car, a key piece of evidence in a witness-murder case.

“I parked it in front of the house,” he said. “This is really odd, I thought. Why do I have this car? The car sat there, burned up.”

As Dana read through thousands of pages of discovery materials for the murder trial, she said, she learned Shawn was not the only witness Burns and York plotted to kill.

At least four other witnesses “were targeted for death,” she said. “I don’t think any of them were warned.”

Cocha Heyden, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office, said detectives were hampered for months by uncooperative witnesses.

And Shawn “refused to speak with us,” she said. “He never relayed to us that he was in fear of anything.”

John Topolnicki, who prosecuted Cernig lia’s killers, said the Sheriff’s Office did learn that Burns and York were asking inmates who were about to get out of jail to harm or kill other witnesses.

The Sheriff’s Office did “the most outstanding job of witness protection that you could talk about,” he said. “There was intense, extensive monitoring of everything that Burns and York did.”

He said detectives did meet with the families of other witnesses whose names appeared on a death list. “Did they say there were witness-relocation resources? I can’t tell you that,” he said.

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